On Music
GOLDMAN, ALBERT
MUSIC By Albert Goldman Wagner: Poet-Musician of the Theater LONDON'S brilliant new Das Rhein-gold will enable record listeners to appreciate for the first time the real Wagner—the poet-musician...
...Instrumental phrasing and speech style are things so different that only a performer of genius can fuse them together...
...George London vocalizes the part of Wotan splendidly, but his tremendous voice rolls out of a rather empty head...
...All the critics have acclaimed the Alberich of this performance, Gustaf Neidlinger...
...It is to be hoped that London will carry out its great project of a complete recording of the Ring cycle in the new stereophonic technique...
...Everything that is great in him rises from this source...
...In another aspect, he is an actor imparting the tonal characteristics of speech to his declamation to suggest emotional qualities beyond the capacities of music...
...MUSIC By Albert Goldman Wagner: Poet-Musician of the Theater LONDON'S brilliant new Das Rhein-gold will enable record listeners to appreciate for the first time the real Wagner—the poet-musician of the theater...
...Das Rheingold is a delightful exception...
...Attaining a balance of dramatic urgency with epic grandeur is not so hard in Das Rheingold as it is in other Wagnerian operas...
...Wagner's ideal singer is really not a singer at all...
...Neidlinger is one of the very few singers who realize the true Wagnerian style...
...By a skillful use of new recording techniques, by making the singers literally enact their parts, and, most important, by planning the whole production with the Wagnerian ideal of a music-drama squarely before them, the people at London have finally put the record listener inside the opera house...
...With such a prologue ringing in our ears, it will be hard if we must wait long for Die Walkure: der Ring des Nibelungen, erster Tag...
...Georg Solti was the right choice, as every moment of the performance tells us...
...Neidlinger has done this very thing throughout his long and difficult role...
...For one thing, the action moves steadily and evenly without the usual longueurs...
...In this recording, every effort was made to exploit the legitimate theatrical opportunities in the score...
...From the first finely imagined scene in the depths of the Rhine to the concluding procession across the Rainbow Bridge and into Valhalla, the myth is unfolded in vigorous action and stately pageantry...
...To make this new production method a success, London needed a conduotor with an instinct for the theater, someone who could see the music not as a symphonic score, but as the embodiment of what is really a poetic conception...
...In fact, the century-old debate over the value of Wagner's music would cease tomorrow if people would only stop judging this music as if it were a kind of orchestral composition, and learn to appreciate it correctly as theatrical scene-painting and sound effects...
...It is one of the paradoxes of the Wagnerian system that, having freed his singers to move and act by abolishing the formal rigidity of the aria da capo (executed down-center with an eye on the conductor), Wagner wrote dramas with practically no action and an enormous amount of talk ("executed down-center with an eve on the conductor...
...but this is the price we must pay for trying to make our living room into the Festspielhaus...
...Occasionally the light becomes dazzling and we find ourselves wanting the comfortable haze of the conventional style...
...More than anything else, this endless standing about and talking through the story, instead of acting it out, makes Wagner dull...
...The results are stunning...
...Kirsten Flagstad and Set Svanholm are not at their best in roles like Fricka and Loge...
...Nothing is more vital to an understanding of Wagner than a sense of the sheer theatricalism of his imagination...
...The 14 singers assembled for this performance are all very good, although the most famous members of the cast are a little disappointing...
...Episodes like the descent to Nibelheim with its aural raise en scene—clanking anvils, screaming dwarfs, and an orchestra that lowers and snarls—are wonderfully effective, but in a way that is not the way of music...
...Under one aspect, he is an instrumentalist who can deploy his voice against the orchestra like a solo trumpet or trombone, and execute the kind of phrasing characteristic of these instruments...
...He has turned a fierce, white light on Wagner's colossal mural of Gods and Goddesses, Valhalla, Nibelheim and the Urwelt, and now its brilliant colors and bold contours stand out with extraordinary vividness...
Vol. 42 • September 1959 • No. 34
